This invention relates to a tool for trimming, shaping and burnishing the tips of billiard and pool sticks.
The high interest which these games have held for the public over a period of many years has been in part the result of the precision shots which highly skilled play brings about. These, in turn, rely on accurately placed impacts of the cue stick on the cue ball. A properly shaped and chalked leather tip insures that the contact will occur at a desired point on the cue ball; frictional resistance of the leather on the highly polished ball surface is relied upon to prevent slippage. The leather tip also protects the ball from chipping and from nicks and assures that the end of the stick will not splinter during hard impacts. Various spins can be imparted to the cue ball by precisely placed, off-center impacts and high velocities can be reached without damaging the equipment.
Various tools have been devised for adding new cue tips and for trimming and shaping them. Mahoney in 1910(U.S. Pat. No. 955,819) developed an apparatus with crank-operated grinding and sanding arrangements with which a newly attached tip can be trimmed and shaped. A cue tip trimmer by Zownir(U.S. Pat. No. 4,620,370) resembles a pencil sharpener; a fixed blade is rotated around the end of the billiard stick. The leather cue tip is, however, softer than pencil wood and will deform on encountering the blade. By cocking the stick, Zownir can exert sufficient pressure against the leather to stiffen it and allow trimming with the undesirable side effect that the tip is left somewhat tapered.
A recent improvement by Willard(U.S. Pat. No. 4,594,782) teaches a small, simple tool which can be attached to a key chain and which contains a concave sanding surface with projections by means of which a new cue tip can be trimmed and shaped. The Willard device also contains a guage to judge when the tip is properly shaped or when a used tip needs reshaping.
A cue tipping machine by Calabrese (U.S. Pat. No. 4,987,931) has provision for removing old cement from the end of the billiard stick, flattening the end, positioning a new tip on the end after adhesive is applied and clamping the new tip rigidly until the adhesive is dry. Other features include trimming means for the sides of the tip and rounding means for the end. Although the Calabrese device can be used in all the steps of of cue tip preparation, its trimming feature does not accomodate a number of cue stick sizes; a single large opening is used for all sizes. Many cue sticks must therefore be cocked during the trimming stage.
An early device by Boyle (U.S. Pat. No. 89,624), on the other hand, recognized this difficulty of leather compression and used a stretched rubber ring to press four knives radially against the cue tip and thus by-passed the problem.